Mills, presses, crushers, and other crushing devices used to comminute material often include a crushing body or multiple crushing bodies that are configured to impact material to crush or grind the material. Often the crushing bodies are configured to grind the material between a surface of the crushing body and a table, wall, or other surface. Examples of such crushing devices may be appreciated from U.S. Pat. Nos. 252,755, 278,272, 412,558, 1,225,061, 1,589,302, 3,955,766, 3,964,717, 4,369,926, 4,485,974, 4,582,260, 4,848,683, 5,203,513, 5,823,450, and 6,523,767 and U.S. Patent Application Publication No. 2009/0218429. As another example, roller presses may have one or more rollers configured to impact material to grind the material. Each roller may include a wear surface. The wear surface may be attached to the roller. For instance, the wear surface of the roller may be welded to the roller.
A wearable surface typically experiences wear as material is crushed by the wear surface. After a period of time, the wear surface may experience a sufficient amount of wear such that it is unable to crush material or experiences a great reduction in crushing ability. For example, portions of the wear surface may erode or become broken during use and subsequently requires replacement or repair.
Some wearable surfaces used in crushing devices include hexagonal tiles, such as the tiles disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,755,033. A tiled surface can include tiles that have gaps between the tiles. The tiles are affixed to a base material and are harder than the base material. Such tiles are often costly to process due to the size of the equipment necessary to make such products. Further, such tiled wearable surfaces are usually not capable of being repaired while the wearable surface is positioned in a plant or processing line for grinding material. The inability to conduct in-situ repairs on such products can be a major hindrance for a manufacturer and can greatly increase the cost of maintaining or repairing such devices.
Other wearable surfaces used in crushing devices may be appreciated from U.S. Pat. No. 5,269,477. Such wearable surfaces include insert members embedded in a surface of a cylindrical press roll. A binding ring may be used to attach the inserts to the press roll. The insert members may project radially into the surface of the roll. The insert members are configured to crush material. Rollers with such a wear surface may require a relatively intensive amount of labor to embed the insert members into the surface of a roller. The lead times for manufacturing such products is also relatively high. Further, serial production is difficult for such rollers. These types of rollers may also have a relatively limited capacity for in-situ repair, such as repair while the rollers are on equipment in a production line of a manufacturing facility.
Previously filed U.S. patent application Ser. No. 12/766,110 discloses crushing devices that utilize crushing bodies that have wearable surfaces formed from explosion forging processes and explosion welding processes. The owner of the rights in the present application also owns the rights to U.S. patent application Ser. No. 12/766,110. The entirety of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 12/766,110 is incorporated by reference herein. The crushing bodies disclosed in U.S. patent application Ser. No. 12/766,110 may be sized and configured for use in a wide array of commination devices such as crushing devices or grinding devices. Among other things, that application discloses a method of making crushing bodies by explosively forging hard inserts within at least one metal structure to form a crushing body. However, to subsequently shape such a crushing body to a desired shape may require extensive cutting or shaping due to the cutting of the hard inserts positioned within the crushing body. Such subsequent shaping may add significant time and cost to the manufacture of such crushing bodies or crushing devices utilizing such crushing bodies.
A new wearable surface is needed that may be defined on a crushing body so that the crushing body may be formed and shaped quickly and at a lower cost than crushing bodies of the prior art. Preferably, such a wearable surface is able to permit relatively short lead times for manufacturing and may permit in-situ repairs to take place while the equipment is in a product line of a manufacturing facility, crushing circuit, or material processing facility.